BOOKS OF THE TIMES

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Overexamined Life: The 'Real' Judy Garland

By JANET MASLIN

Published: April 27, 2000

GET HAPPY

The Life of Judy Garland

By Gerald Clarke

510 pages. Random House. $29.95.

What do Odysseus, Sir Galahad and pigtailed little Dorothy from ''The Wizard of Oz'' have in common? Answer: lonely quests through hostile territory. But this is no parlor game. It's the high-minded desperation that serves as ballast for ''Get Happy,'' Gerald Clarke's scandal-seeking yet curiously wan biography of Judy Garland. In the long shadow of the author's splendid portrait of Truman Capote, ''Get Happy'' recalls James Agee's complaint that ''The Clock,'' a Vincente Minnelli film in which Garland starred, ''inspires ingratitude for not being great.''

Mr. Clarke puts himself at a serious disadvantage in moving from a fresh, witty, reasonably unexamined subject like Capote to a woman whose entire adult life unfolded in a climate of sob-sister press scrutiny. Her triumphs and calamities were chronicled with tireless vigor. ''I must say I never thought I'd live to see the day when anyone would be tossed into the jug for saying Judy Garland had problems,'' wrote the columnist Dorothy Kilgallen after another reporter was briefly jailed for libel. Among the newspaper and magazine articles that this book swallows as reliable source material are ''The Real Me,'' ''I'm Judy Garland -- and This Is My Story'' and ''Judy Garland Achieves New Level of Poignancy.''

The basic trajectory of the star's life, from soulful baby precocity (she sang torch songs in childhood) to MGM heyday to descent into drug-addled misery, is thus well known. For instance, it was set forth in Gerold Frank's credulous but thorough 1975 ''Judy,'' from which ''Get Happy'' borrows frequently. And when it comes to an appreciation of Garland's talent, well, she herself once offered one: ''I have a machine in my throat that gets into many people's ears and affects them.'' Try as he will to evoke mythology or Milton from time to time, Mr. Clarke has precious little to add to that description.

What, then, warrants this new look at the life of Judy Garland? The opportunity to put her on the kind of pedestal that comes complete with pigeon droppings. In keeping with today's appetites for tabloid allegations couched as valuable data, Mr. Clarke devotes inordinate attention to determining just how bisexual were many of the men in Garland's life, just how many married men or father figures she fooled around with, and just how foul she could be while wallowing in substance abuse. The kind of nugget to be found here is the interview with William Tuttle, who was once head of MGM's makeup department and told Mr. Clarke of having dropped a Benzedrine pill while in Garland's presence. ''Like a dog jumping for a scrap,'' Mr. Clarke writes gracelessly, ''Judy grabbed it almost before it hit the floor.''

''Get Happy'' is thus ready to reel off incidents like Garland's pitching a self-destructive fit while wielding a hot curling iron, even if this episode comes secondhand, courtesy of a hairdresser who described it to a friend. There's more in the same poisonous vein, much of it accompanied by craven page notes that explain ''the friend who told me the story has asked me not to reveal her name,'' or ''the lover made that boast to a source who requested anonymity.'' Rock bottom is reached with an anecdote about a waste basket used as a chamber pot. Just how far over the rainbow need the reader go to get away from stuff like this?

One nominal justification for this book is Mr. Clarke's access to previously unavailable autobiographical material from Garland herself. And it's true that the tenor of her recollections -- a childhood trauma here, a grope from Louis B. Mayer there -- is just right for the author's purposes. Quoted in the book only briefly, her audiotaped rantings are excruciating, fueled by the raging bitterness and pathos that shaped her final years. ''I'm an angry lady! I've been insulted! Slandered! Humiliated!'' Mr. Clarke describes her as screaming. And: ''I hate anybody's guts who used me, because I wanted to be a nice girl.''

Unquestionably, there is an art to the clever exploitation of such pain. Throw enough biographical mud against the wall and a coherent picture may just take shape. But an author with a fondness for words like rutilant, cunctatory and exundant, and with a tendency to sound more like a perfunctory chronicler than a muckophile, is apt to lack the bare-knuckles brutality that the genre increasingly demands. Mr. Clarke winds up wavering awkwardly between the tut-tut outing of Garland's secrets and the clammy hyperbole of the reverential fan. When Garland's hand and footprints were immortalized in the sidewalk at Grauman's Chinese Theater, he declares that ''like the image of some girl of Pompeii, immortalized by a belch from Vesuvius, her lithic impression would remain long after she herself was gone.''

''Get Happy'' leaves the Garland legend in need of a sharper lithic impression than this. As Mr. Clarke all too persuasively demonstrates, a yellow brick road paved with anguish-peddling anecdotes may not lead anywhere. For all its new embellishments, the life story told here sounds bleak and weary. It might have found more to work with had it gone on to consider the cult of unflagging adoration Garland has inspired, the larger implications of her lonely legend, and the Marilynization of her victories and frailties into the essence of a durable show business icon.

Then, of course, there is her music, which tells a gut-wrenching life story of its own and remains magnificently evergreen in ways that ''Get Happy'' never begins to fathom. There will always be a deeper thrill in the astonishing drama of that voice than in the most tone-deaf (''Who finally introduced her to the pleasures of sex, and where and when, is a question without an answer'') of biographical observations.